Love's Lost From Life In Foster Care

It's one thing to hear about the disintegration of the family and quite another to read the true story of what happens to one family of children once they are abandoned by their mother. The tragic mistakes of the foster-care system often make the headlines, but what about the small heartbreaks and the simple pain of abandonment that aren't exactly newsworthy but comprise the reality of so many children?

Paula McLain's story of her ordeals in the foster-care system is told with a dispassionate grace that puts a human face, actually three human faces, on the alarming statistics.

McLain is the middle of three girls whose mother drives off into the sunset with a boyfriend after their father goes to prison for a botched robbery. The girls--aged 6, 4 and 3 -- get shuttled between family members until finally a foster home is found for them.

What they receive in one foster home after another are the basics -- food, shelter and education. But that's where the care seems to end time and again. Of course, the sexual molestation that at least two of the girls endure is so mundane as to be part and parcel of the landscape.

The last foster home where the girls wind up belongs to the Lindberghs, who have decided to become foster parents in order to provide sisters for their only child. Needless to say, this is a poor excuse to bring children into your home. And yet this couple offers a better life for the girls than anyone before or after.

By this time, the girls are 10, 8 and 7. The father, Bud Lindbergh, actually horses around with them and treats them like daughters while they are young, but the mother never opens her heart to them. When they are introduced to acquaintances, she is quick to point out that they are not her real children.

As the girls become teenagers, the Lindberghs continue to provide for them, while the girls continue to ache for something like love. Hilde, the mother, not only cannot show them any affection. She is sometimes physically and often psychologically abusive.

Finally, the split between the foster girls and their foster family becomes sealed when they falsely accuse the eldest girl of theft. When the Lindberghs take a "family" vacation without Paula and her sisters, a sense of freedom pervades the house.

"Without Bud and Hilde, the house expanded like a lung, rising weightless around us. We drank lemonade so thick with sugar the granules rained toward the bottom of the jug. We stood with the refrigerator door open, took thirty minute showers, let the dogs on the carpet ... I strung a dream in which I was a whole family, all by myself: the mother and the father and the baby playing with its toes."

McLain's book is likened to The Liar's Club, a misleading comparison. In spite of McLain's credentials as a poet, Like Family does not have (nor does it really need) the lyrical power of Karr's memoir.

However, this book has a power of its own -- the raw force of a memorable and well-told story of children who overcome the injustice of their abandoned state and grow up to fashion some sort of reasonable adulthood for themselves. You're likely to have a lump in your throat by the end of this gutsy and honest tale.

Pat MacEnulty, a freelance writer based in North Carolina, is the author of Sweet Fire.